History Didn't Tell It Like It Was For Old West Women

WACO, Texas — The stars of the Old West tend to be men out conquering the land, making themselves at home on the range or defending the trail.

Yet Shirley Weaver of Wortham, who has worked cattle with her husband for 46 years, marvels at how her predecessors took on the back-breaking tasks of plowing and farming while the men were away.

The times were so much harder, she says, recalling how her grandmother had to wring a chicken's neck and pluck its feathers to feed unexpected company, how her ancestors canned the food they lived off of.

Scraping by with leftovers, surviving on the butter and egg money, these wives cobbled together a life.

"I just think women have gotten a bum rap," she said. "And I love cowboys. That song, `My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys,' that's just the way I feel. I love men who are cowboys. But the women, I mean they walked a lot of times on the wagon trains. They were just tough."

Author Janice Woods Windle, who has researched the history of her family in the Hill Country of Central Texas over several generations, tells the story of a general in San Marcos who built a fine home with wooden shingles.

He told his very pregnant wife he needed to head out with a posse and she asked what she'd do without him there to chop wood. He, according to the story, told her she'd cope.

When he returned, he marveled at the newborn baby and his wife's excellent health. Then he asked about the wooden shingles that had been taken off the house.

The wife, who had burned the shingles to keep warm and cook, simply replied, "Oh, I coped," Windle said.

These are not the feats that make history books.

"The story of women in the West is basically an oral history," Windle said. "It is transferred from one female voice to the next."

When a woman is pregnant, she hears of the joys and fears of raising children. When her survival is threatened, she learns how her mother and grandmother dealt with threats.

"The ceremonies of life were not written down, except in letters," Windle said.

Even then, details never made it into the records.

Disease would have been such a part of daily life that a woman might never have written about how a neighbor's entire family died of smallpox or describe how she had washed the bodies. Horrors were simply part of the picture.

"It was almost accepted that a woman would lose her first baby," Windle said.

These weren't the images printed onto posters at the turn of the century.

According to Don Reeves, curator of cowboy collections at the National Cowboy Hall of Fame, by the 1900s calendars began depicting ranch girls with hourglass figures, prim and proper with riding skirt, gloves and hat.

A six-gun would be strapped around their waists.

"You started seeing this kind of unusual thing of, `Yes, she was a lady, but she was a lady of the West,' " Reeves said.

When women appeared in Westerns, it was often as a Calamity Jane figure dressed as a man or as a harlot with a heart of gold.

The reality was much more complex. To begin with, notes historian Katherine Jellison, "when we think of women in the West, we largely think of white women. Yet there were so many women of color."

After the Civil War, the West, more than any other part of country, was a cultural mosaic of Hispanic, Indian, Anglo, European and African-American women, said Jellison, associate professor of history at Ohio University.

Even the white women hardly fell neatly into the boxes movies created for them.

Martha Jane Canary--the model for Calamity Jane--didn't live up to her fictional counterpart.

Jellison describes her as a publicity seeker who hung around mining towns, doing working class jobs.

Conee Duran, a Baylor University graduate student in American studies, notes that Calamity Jane fiction portrays her as a poor, innocent girl who had to take up a gun to defend herself.

"But they ignored any part of the real story that didn't fit," Duran said. "She was a madam; they left that out."

Prostitutes were common in the movies, but they were decked out in glittery costumes.

In reality, these women dressed like the working class, Jellison said. They weren't as well spoken as Miss Kitty of the television series "Gunsmoke."

Their lives were more dangerous than the films show.

"Women didn't invent any new significant roles for themselves," Jellison said. "The kinds of images movies give us of life in the West are largely wrong."